Category: Language

I’ve been looking into doing JS trans-compiled languages recently. The usual suspects popped up. ClosureScript, Elm, TypeScript, and maybe a few others. This had the unexpected effect of needing the VS Code software as some of the plugins do not yet work with VS Community. I opened up some TypeScript I had wrote recently, and found the way “require” is used for loading is not recognised in VS Code. Strange, and it might cause problems with passing on code to others.

I looked into Elm which is a Haskell for JS. It looks quite good, and I’ve downloaded the kit. I’ll let you know if I start using it big. Closure is Scheme or LISP almost. It seems to have little editor support compared to Elm, and I’d prefer to use Elm over Closure. I already have some libraries downloaded for functional extensions to JS, and some .d.ts descriptors too for some. The main reason I’ve never used Haskell is the large GHC binary size. The idea of using JS as the VM is good. It does however dump about 6000 lines of JS code for a hello world. I haven’t tested if this is per module. I understand Elm can do very fast HTML rendering though, so something to look into.

There’s also Haxe of course, and plenty of plain vanilla JS functional programming modules, including some like RQ, for threading control. Some nice Monad libraries, and good browser support. I also like the TinyMCE. It’s quite a classic. For the toolkit, Bootstrap.js is the current best with all the needed features of a modern looking site.

Beware much ado about category theory, and things like the continuation monad can do all sequential processing … of course from the context of writing it in a sequential language … blah, blah, stored state, pretend there’s none, blah, blah, monad, blah, delay output by wrapper, blah. Ok, well it is true I’m 46, but you young coders out there should take some of the symbology with quite a big pinch of salt, and maybe have a more interesting look at things like the Y combinator. It’s kind of what Mathematica would call Hold[] but with more monad blah for what is really group theory.